These Are the Cameos The Mandalorian and Grogu Wants Us to Be Excited For?

One of the sillier pleasures of Star Wars fandom is finding a “Glup Shitto,” the fan terminology for a minor character brimming with personality in the background of Luke, Leia, Han Solo, or Anakin’s melodrama — and bonus points if they have an absolutely absurd name. It’s always a thrill to appoint a character into the fan-named corral of weirdos, but in Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, there are no such characters begging to be remembered (aside from a couple of Babu Frik-inspired Anzellans, I’ll give ’em that).

It would seem natural for this film to produce a character worth fawning over as Mando and Grogu flit from location to location and bounty to bounty. The problem is that all of the most likely candidates are deployed primarily as a wink-and-nod to the most hard-core Star Wars fans … specifically those of Lucasfilm president and creative chief Dave Filoni’s animated shows. Ever since Ahsoka Tano made the leap into the body of Rosario Dawson, The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels characters have become increasingly prominent across Star Wars’ live-action TV projects, and now Filoni and Favreau have managed to bring them to the big screen, too. The problem is that these characters are introduced to the film as if we should already know who they are instead of providing new ways for viewers to latch onto them.

In The Mandalorian and Grogu, the titular duo occasionally work with Rebels’ Zeb Orrielos, who isn’t given much time to form a meaningful relationship with the Mandalorian. Halfway through, Mando is captured by Clone Wars’ bounty hunter Embo, who was voiced by Filoni on the show but never utters so much as a single line of dialogue here. And the plot is anchored by Mando and Grogu trying to rescue Jabba’s son, Rotta the Hutt (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), nicknamed Stinky by Ahsoka in The Clone Wars, from the least menacing crime lord put to screen, Lord Janu (Jonny Coyne). Did anyone tell White that he would be voicing a mid-tier character affectionately known as Stinky, or was he just distracted by the fact that he has abs?

Oh, and let’s not forget two gratuitous in-the-flesh cameos from Filoni himself, who has popped up several times in the Mandalorian TV show as X-wing pilot Trapper Wolf and shows up here presumably again as Trapper Wolf, but the film doesn’t care to engage with his character beyond showing him hanging out on a Rebel base. (And yes, he wears a hat.) Sure, in both of his appearances, he’s not alone: We first see him alongside some other Mandalorian directors (Doug Chiang and Deborah Chow, to name a couple) hanging out at the Resistance base behind Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward and the Mandalorian, while his second appearance comes in the film’s finale as he flies an X-wing alongside Ward and some minor characters he had a hand in creating (like Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as Carson Teva, a Rebel pilot who almost got a spinoff alongside Gina Carano) as they save the Mandalorian. But in both instances, the camera lingers on Filoni long enough that you can feel the film hoping that the Star Wars fan next to you will lean over to whisper “that’s the Dave Filoni” in the same tenor one would notice the George Lucas.

It’s not that Filoni’s animated creations shouldn’t get the opportunity to leap into a larger medium; it’s that these renditions of them assume they already mean as much to fans as they clearly do to Filoni. Perhaps if the man spent a little less energy showing us his affection for his action figures characters, and put a little more into translating their appeal to new fans, it would give viewers the opportunity to discover their own Glup Shittos.